Date: December 19, 2019
Bear Run Farm
Participants: Fiddle and Ukulele
It has been awhile since I did a herding lesson, or a lesson of any sort. It has been a painful few weeks for me, with Black Friday and the end of the semester. The overall objective today was to get the entire flock (pictured in the left photo), wormed. We did some work with the whole large flock. However, we are still a bit shaky as a team. But, with Kate, her border collie partner in crime, we managed to get all of the sheep and goats gate sorted, driven to the chute, and pushed into it.
This was the first time I actually asked her to do some real work. The two of them were Tag Team. Kate would cover, escapees, and Fiddle would do the pushing. As my husband called it “Bad Cop, Worse Cop”. If you don’t listen to the crazy eyed border collie, you would get punished by the pointy eared red head. No fear to bite and turn the sheep. Pretty great.
Uke had to wait her turn (it takes several hours to worm). I was proud of her. She is not as intense as Fiddle was at this age. It is surprising, living with this dog, to see her possess thoughtfulness and control (she kinda doesn’t have any). It was a very short working session of 10 minutes, with a lot of talking and learning on my end. Her flanks were pretty good, though she got pretty sticky sometimes. She has a lot more pause and thoughtfulness. We have a lot of work left to do.
Clarjo Farms 